


His Banner over Me

by SylvanWitch



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Angst, Infidelity, M/M, Requited Unrequited Love, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:55:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21575599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: I love you, I hate myselfwas Sidney's secret act of contrition, though as he never intended to repent of this sin, he guessed he was damned in any case.
Relationships: Sidney Chambers/Geordie Keating
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48
Collections: Spicy Advent - Multi-fandom Porn Advent Calendar 2019





	His Banner over Me

**Author's Note:**

> The title is adapted from Song of Solomon 2:4.
> 
> The epigram is from Song of Solomon 1:2.
> 
> The postscript is from Song of Solomon 2:16.

_Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth._

“I love my wife.” 

The words, breathless and muffled as they were by the damp skin of Sidney’s throat, belied Geordie’s actions.

He was rutting desperately against Sidney, his hard cock sliding in the sweaty slot where Sidney’s impressive abdomen met his equally impressive thigh.

Geordie’s breath was so short that Sidney might have thought he was sobbing, except for the steady stream of invective pouring from between his clenched teeth as Sidney timed his own motions to slide his cock between Geordie’s legs, catching him on the sweet spot there.

“And hate yourself,” Sidney panted, fulfilling the litany of self-loathing he’d come to expect whenever temptation overcame Geordie, and they fell into bed together.

Sidney kept to himself his own act of contrition— _I love you, I hate myself_ —because he understood that if he said those words aloud, he’d give Geordie’s self-hatred an external target, and then they’d never be able to work together again, never mind this thing they did now and again that he couldn’t bring himself to call fucking but also was not quite fool enough to call lovemaking.

Sidney didn’t hate himself for enjoying sex with men as well as women; he figured God had made him in His image, so his desires must be acceptable in the sight of God.

He didn’t hate himself for his part in making Geordie unfaithful, though God knew Sidney should be full of loathing for that. Cathy had done nothing to deserve Geordie’s betrayal of their most sacred vows, and Sidney was ashamed of leading Geordie into that betrayal, even if it had been Geordie who’d first come on to him and not the other way around. Even so, he didn’t hate himself for it.

Sidney didn’t even hate himself for the sin of fornication, though he knew it was also damning, especially because he had no intention of repenting. The next time Geordie needed this itch scratched, Sidney would eagerly oblige.

No, Sidney’s hate came from an altogether different part of him than his long-suffering, tarnished soul. 

His loathing was seated in the place of his heart, which beat entirely too quickly beneath Geordie’s barrage of curse words. He loved Geordie with a distracting passion. His tired, world-weary smile made Sidney heavy in his belly with heat and want. His bark of a laugh sent a zing right to Sidney’s cock.

But it was the way Geordie loved the world, despite its myriad flaws, despite the ample evidence he’d gathered over his long lifetime as an officer of the law—the love that sent him back out to crime scenes, to knocking on doors and asking questions and seeking tirelessly for clues, no matter what it shaved off the slender thread of his faith in humanity to keep doing the work…

 _That’s_ what Sidney loved the most.

Of course, he couldn’t tell Geordie any of it, could only content himself with helping carry Geordie’s burden when he could, even if it meant immolating himself on this self-sacrificial pyre, so close to the annihilating flame yet so far from Geordie’s heart.

With a choked cry, Geordie came, and the heat of his spend against Sidney’s belly and the smell of it in the air drove him to his own completion, eyes tightly closed, jaw clenched against the shout that wanted to drive its way out of him.

He wanted the world to know what Geordie did to him almost as much as he wanted Geordie to do it to him again.

But Sidney couldn’t have that, either. If anyone discovered what they did to and with each other, here in the low-rent motel room they occasionally reserved under a false name, it would be the end of everything that mattered in both of their lives.

That cold thought washed over him, made him shiver, and Geordie murmured a question as he pushed himself off Sidney and flopped on his back in the narrow space beside him on the single bed they shared whenever Geordie grew restless for him.

“What is it, love?” Geordie asked, and Sidney quashed the hope that word, so carelessly used, always tried to raise in him. 

“Nothing,” Sidney said, reaching to the scarred bedside table for his cigarettes and a light.

“No, it’s definitely something,” Geordie said in the patient, relentless policeman’s tone he used with reluctant witnesses.

But Sidney just shook his head, lips clamped around the cigarette, and then took his time blowing smoke into the air above them.

“Sidney,” Geordie cajoled, running the back of his hand along Sidney’s arm. “You know you can tell me anythin’, don’t you?”

Throat full of the things he couldn’t say, Sidney shook his head again, took a long drag, held it, feeling it burn down his windpipe and spread through his lungs.

Geordie pushed himself up onto one elbow and rested his hand on Sidney’s chest.

“Don’t do this,” he said quietly, all at once serious.

“Do what?” Sidney said, not looking at him. He couldn’t bear to see sympathy in Geordie’s face; it looked too much like pity.

“You’re eating at yourself about this again, aren’t you?” Geordie spread his fingers so that the tip of his pinkie just brushed the tight nub of Sidney’s nipple.

Sidney sucked in a breath, startled by the overstimulation, and then choked on it. The ensuing coughing fit gave him time to pull his thoughts together and make up a reasonable explanation for his sudden melancholy.

“I am,” he lied smoothly. “As usual,” he continued, donning the self-deprecating smile he saved for these sorts of occasions, a latter-day flagellant confessing to his obsession with the flail.

“There’s something else, though, isn’t there, love?” The soft tone, the gentle, deliberate caress of his nipple, the heat of Geordie’s body stretched out along his flank made Sidney want to simultaneously wrap his arms around him and shove him viciously out of the bed.

“Don’t,” he said, trying to bite the word off before it even left his mouth.

“Don’t what?” Geordie pursued, a hound on the scent.

Sidney looked at him then, tried to hide the anguish and the loss, tried to jolly Geordie out of detective mode by tracing a line down his thigh with the hand trapped between their bodies.

“Love,” Geordie chided, and the tone was so much like the one Geordie used when Cathy was being, to his mind, unnecessarily anxious that it snapped something inside of Sidney that might have been the last, frayed tether to his self-control.

Surging up onto his side, he grasped Geordie’s hand, holding it still so it couldn’t continue the maddening touches, and then loomed over him, inches from his kiss-reddened lips.

“Don’t call me ‘love’,” he growled, claiming Geordie’s mouth before the man could manage a response.

Eventually, Geordie began to make noises of protest in the back of his throat, began to squirm, trying to escape Sidney’s ruthlessly thorough kisses, but Sidney, who had had enough of brinksmanship and almost mindless with trying to relay to Geordie all the things he wasn’t allowed to say, wouldn’t relent.

It wasn’t until Geordie nudged a strategic knee into his soft bits, applying a warning pressure, that Sidney pulled away, gasping for air himself even as Geordie gaped and shuddered in his grip.

“What—?” Geordie tried, but he clearly needed a minute to regain his breath. That minute passed in stiff silence, neither of them moving except for the heaving of their chests.

“What was that?” Geordie asked. “You pissed at me?”

Now that the worst of his impulse had passed, Sidney was ashamed to his bones of what he’d done. He felt his cheeks heat with shame, and he swallowed hard before he could find enough saliva to say, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—.”

“Don’t you tell me that, Sidney Chambers. That was the sexiest thing we’ve ever done together,” Geordie answered, effectively derailing Sidney’s apology. “It’s not the _what_ I’m worried about, lo—Sidney. It’s the _why_.”

Stricken by the obvious concern in Geordie’s face and by the way he was still letting Sidney hold him, pliant and trusting in his arms, Sidney ducked his head, pressing his cheek against Geordie’s, safely out of sight of those eyes that saw everything but the one truth Sidney was desperate to hide and just as desperate to have revealed.

He tried to marshal his breath and muster the last of his will to keep silent, to put on a mask of happy indifference, like what Geordie was to him amounted to no more than the cool semen drying on his belly. It took too long by half, though, and before Sidney could formulate a reasonable facsimile of a man who wasn’t miserably in love with his best friend, Geordie whispered in his ear.

“I love you,” Geordie said, and it was so much the tone and words that Sidney himself was chanting in his head that for a moment he thought they’d come from him.

Then Geordie said them again, softer, pressing each word against Sidney’s temple with a kiss. “I. Love. You.”

With a herculean effort, Sidney tried to hold back the flood of impossible joy surging through him, but he couldn’t. Whole body wracked with shivers, Sidney slipped lower in the bed and pushed Geordie down so that he might hide his face against his chest and feel that mighty heart beating beneath his ear, loud enough that it drowned out even the panicked blood thundering in his ears.

“Here, now, what’s this? The great Sidney Chambers knocked speechless by three little words?”

Geordie’s words were chivvying, but his tone was gentle, touched with wonder, and his hand was cradling the back of Sidney’s skull like he was keeping something precious from being destroyed.

“I love you,” Sidney managed, recognizing Geordie’s teasing for what it really was. “I’ve loved you from the day we met. I don’t ever want to be apart from you. I want to be yours always.”

They were the sort of words said in the kind of voice reserved for holy vows; they should echo through the heavenly space of an apse. They’d have to settle for the low-ceilinged, dingy room in which they were spoken, no less holy for being a disreputable motel, no less meaningful for being unwitnessed except by Geordie and God Himself.

“It’s good, then, that I feel the same,” Geordie answered, shifting his grip to draw Sidney up for a simple, close-mouthed kiss of the plighting kind.

In the dim recess of his intellect, Sidney knew that their mutual declaration solved none of their problems, but for the moment, he didn’t want to think anymore. Instead, he shifted his hips, so Geordie would spread his thighs and let Sidney rest between them, and he laid his head once more on Geordie’s chest, closing his eyes against tomorrow, content to listen as Geordie murmured lover’s words into his hair.

_My beloved is mine, and I am his._


End file.
